POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Speaking of Envy

To follow up on Enoch's post from yesterday, let's consider a couple of different points of view. And I mean really different.

First, from Clinton crony Robert Reich, a bit of complaining about the demonization of public employee unions.

By the way, Mr. Reich, those "higher degrees" in education circles are bullshit. Wonder why so many diploma mills are giving masters in education? Because public school teachers get a bump up in salary by how many degrees they have. There's a reason that the lowest GRE scores, the lowest SAT scores are for education degrees. When you make salary based on credentials as opposed to actual knowledge and performance, you get a lot of phoney-baloney degrees.

Second, Obama's pity for the poor, departing Gibbs who had to make do on a less-than-200K salary as the President's mouthpiece.

That comment reminds me of when Sen. Lauch Faircloth (Republican, North Carolina) tried to claim that his family was on a middle class income at the low, low amount of $300K. In the 90s. Needless to say, this was the guy that John Edwards (Democrat, Two Americas) beat for Senate seat.... and Edwards definitely didn't have a piddly income of $300K at the time. [Edwards represented my family in a medical malpractice case, by the way.]

So back to the public unions. Don't like your public image? Realize you have a PR problem. Your =customers= are the public, and they are pissed off. Private companies have to deal with this crap all the time, and even if something is not actually their fault, they do realize they have to do something about the impression that it is. In general, it's recognized that whining about unfairness is not an effective PR move. It might have helped some of these public policy guys if they actually had a real job at some point, where they had to deal with this sort of situation. They need some diversity in their ranks.

Separately, if the cuts are getting to be too much, then quit. If you think the pay is too low, go somewhere else. This is the way it works in the private sector -- often we see people "underpaid" for their jobs... because the employer knows it can get away with it. Why? Because said employee has allowed themselves to get stuck in some way - won't move, won't try to get employment elsewhere, has golden handcuffs in terms of benefits, actually not worth more to other employers, won't develop skills further. The employee then has no leverage.

I was paid piddly as an adjunct, because I could be (lots of starving grad students/newly-minted PhDs out there trying to stay in academia), and I left that to go to the far-more-remunerated actuarial world. The transparency of our salary scales means that employers need to be explicitly competitive. When someone is off the scale, and doesn't move, we know there's a leverage issue. I've often told people that if it's obvious you're not willing to leave, the employer is going to take advantage of that.

Finally, quit trying to gin up class wars. The more you try to foment a class war against "the rich", because some guys in government who went to Yale are making less money than some guys who went to no-name schools and are CEOs of profit-making businesses, the more regular people make their own neighborly comparison.

Envy is almost always amongst those you can see directly. And the "middle class" can see the public employees. The public employees that our taxes get hiked more and more to cover their pay and benefits. Someone got piggy, and there is a price to pay for that.

Again, this does not hold for all government jobs in all places. But the biggest class-war-fomenters seem to be in areas where there indeed is a large gulf between the public "servants" and the people being served. Funny you these highly-degreed people didn't see the possibility of their rhetoric turning right back on them.

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

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